Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing system adapted to be able to supply materials printed by a printing apparatus to either the destination of the first sheet processing apparatus or that of the second sheet processing apparatus, and a control method therefor.
Description of the Related Art
Recently, a POD (Print On Demand) printing system using an electrophotographic or inkjet printing apparatus has been proposed (see, e.g., patent reference 1: Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-310746, and patent reference 2: Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-310747).
In the POD environment, there is a dolly-attached sheet processing apparatus also called a large-volume stacker which outputs many printed materials and assumes the use of a sheet processing apparatus. There are also prepared a printing apparatus capable of connecting a plurality of large-volume stackers, and a printing apparatus connected to even a stapler, saddle stitching apparatus, and the like in order to perform various inline finishing processes.
However, before a printing apparatus connected to a plurality of large-volume stackers completes printing of a job accompanied by output of many pages, one large-volume stacker may become fully loaded with output materials, failing to complete the output. In this case, the user may want to continue printing by switching the output to another large-volume stacker, or may want to print out materials to the same large-volume stacker. In the former case, the user wants to take out a pile of printed materials at once or continue printing even while removing output materials from the fully loaded large-volume stacker. In the latter case, the user has a plurality of dollies, and the time until a dolly is mounted again in the fully loaded large-volume stacker is short, or offline finishing processing is determined for each large-volume stacker.
That is, a printing apparatus connected to a plurality of large-volume stackers must cope with various destinations of printed materials in accordance with the number of output sheets of a job and the user environment (e.g., the number of dollies or a cooperation flow to an offline finishing process).